Hi Steffen
Good to hear that with little programming experience you find VPS a great solution. Even seasoned c programmers will find it heavy going programming a full pid controller with a complete GUI and on-line tuning executed in less than 200uSec. Any way back to your 74595 application. The function block for this will use 3 outputs from PIC to 74595. RCK, SCK, SER. and 1 input (byte value), which will be the patern for the 7 segments. To generate the patern you can use function block 41. Use the simulator for a quick test. For each 7-segment display you will use 3 output pins. If you have 4 or more digits to display you can consider to use a LCD display. There are blocks for displaying text, byte, 16bit-integer, and floating point values. I use the 20x4 line displays quite often. VISUAL PARSIC looks very interesting, is it also using function blocks and does it offer facilities for debugging?
Regards
Lourens